The change of land use/land cover has been known as an imperative force in environmental alteration, especially in arid and semi-arid areas. This research was mainly aimed to assess the validity of two major types of land change modeling techniques via a three dimensional approach in Birjand urban watershed located in an arid climatic region of Iran. Thus, a Markovian approach based on two suitability and transition potential mappers, i.e. fuzzy analytic hierarchy process and artificial neural network-multi layer perceptron was used to simulate land use map. Validation metrics, quantity disagreement, allocation disagreement and figure of merit in a three-dimensional space were used to perform model validation. Utilizing the fuzzy-analytic hierarchy processsimulation of total landscape in the target point 2015, quantity error, the figure of merit and allocation error were 2%, 18.5% and 8%, respectively. However, Artificial neural network-multi layer perceptron simulation led to a marginal improvement in figure of merit, i.e. 3.25%.

Graphical Abstract

Highlights

Land use alterations were mostly harmonized with the expansion of urban patches which resulted in the acreage reduction of rangelands surrounding the city of Birjand in Iran

Using disagreement components in a three dimensional validation approach instead of Kappa coefficient could be a better guide for validating and evaluating model errors

According to the validation indices, Markov simulation based on MLP approach showed a marginally higher robustness for LUCC simulation, as compared with the Fuzzy-AHP transition potential mapper.

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